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Karl Tunberg and his Contribution to Twentieth Century Cinema

A career in the art of cinema

This Website is devoted to Karl Tunberg and his career as a screenwriter, and offers information about the more than forty major motion picture screenplays of which he was either co-author or sole author. The creators of this Website are making every effort to present the most accurate information available. The details offered here about Karl Tunberg's life, professional activities, and film credits have been derived from records kept by the Writer's Guild of America, legal documents, and information provided by family members.

Karl Tunberg (extreme left) With Some of the Cast ofThe Scarlet Coatca. 1955

Born in Spokane, Washington, on March 11, 1907, Karl Tunberg migrated at
an early age to California with and his older brother
William (who also became as screenwriter as an adult), and with his mother ‘Cenna’ (her maiden name was actually Centennial Independence Firebaugh, and she was so named because she was born on 4 July 1876, the first centennial 'birthday' of the United States of America!). Karl Tunberg's birth certificate (in the records of Spokane County Health District, State of Washington) records two children as having been previously born to Cenna. We only have information pertaining to William Tunberg, and have so far encountered no additional trace of this other sibling.

The family lived for a time in Santa Barbara,
but eventually settled in Los Angeles. There Karl attended Hollywood High
School, UCLA and USC. Karl Tunberg was destined to spend much of his life in Los Angeles, though he also lived and worked for many years in London, England. Largely in connection with his film making projects, Karl also traveled throughout Europe, visited China, Malaysia, Japan, and the West Indies. He was married three times and had five children. He served president of the Screen Writers Guild from 1950 to 1951.

His earliest
writings included short stories, and a novel entitled While the Crowd Cheers, which was published in 1935 by the Macaulay
Company. Very soon, Karl Tunberg turned his story-telling talents to
screenplays.Starting in 1937 Karl was on
contract as a screenwriter for Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation under DarrylZanuck. In the early 1940s Karl
Tunberg moved his seat of operations to Paramount Pictures. In the first phase of his career Tunberg typically collaborated with
other writers, especially with Darrell Ware, a deft composer of musical
comedies. Eventually (in the later 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s) Karl worked more frequently on his own. In the late 1940s
he made two films for Universal Studios, with a brief return to Fox (Love That Brute, 1950). This was
followed by a series of large films for MGM in the 1950s, including historical epics such as Beau Brummel, the Scarlet Coat, and Ben Hur, and two
big-production films for United Artists in the early 1960s (Taras Bulba [in collaboration with Waldo Salt], The Seventh Dawn). During
this period he occasionally functioned as producer as well as writer – as in
the case of Count Your Blessings
(1958). In the 1960s Karl also wrote screenplays for two major MGM productions, I Thank a Fool (1962)
and Where Were You When the Lights Went
Out? (1967).Finally, in the early 1970s
Karl Tunberg began writing segments for television series, but he never felt as
much at home in the television medium as he had in the creation of large-screen
motion pictures. The most famous screenplay authored by Karl Tunberg was probably the one he wrote for the 1959 epic, Ben Hur, but Karl Tunberg always told those close to him that he regarded Beau Brummel (1954) as his best work.

20. The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. George Seaton, 1946 (in some sources the release date is given as 1947): story by Ernest Maas and Frederica Maas, with contributions to screenplay by Karl Tunberg and Darrell Ware.